How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

On January 12, 1865, in the midst of the Civil War, General William T. Sherman and U.S. secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton met with twenty Black leaders in Savannah, Georgia. After their spokesman, Garrison Frazier, said they needed land to be free so “we could reap the fruit of our labor, take care of ourselves,” Stanton asked if they would “rather live…scattered among the whites or in colonies by yourselves?” “Live by ourselves,” Frazier responded, “for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over.” Four days later, German Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 to punish Confederate landowners and rid his army camps of runaways. Black people received an army mule and “not more than forty acres” on coastal plains of South Carolina and Georgia. “The sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves,” Sherman ordered. Horace Greeley, the most eminent newspaper editor of the day, thought Sherman’s order deprived the Negroes “of the advantage of white teachers and neighbors, who would lead them to an understanding and enjoyment of that higher civilization of which hitherto they have been deprived as slaves.” Freed Southern Blacks “like their fellows at the North” will be “aided by contact with white civilization,” Greeley wrote in his New-York Tribune on January 30, 1865. Black people were rejecting Greeley’s integrationist strategy. By June 1865, roughly forty thousand Blacks had settled on four hundred th...